Chon's older sister glanced at Seth, searching for a trick. She managed a nervous smile to match Lyseira's. "No, it is well, please. Take money. Is all I have."
"That's why you keep it," Lyseira insisted. A line from Ethaniel's book came to her. "Akir gives us miracles so we might share them." The woman's gaunt face pained her. And her little girl's face is just as thin, Lyseira realized. "In fact, why don't you come in a moment?" She stepped back from the archway to beckon them in. "It's, ah . . . I know it's not much to look at, but―" She opened her pack to find twelve pieces of venison jerky. Enough to get me through tomorrow night, maybe, but not much longer. She took two and offered them to her visitors. "Here. Are you hungry?"
"Lyseira . . ." Seth began, but she ignored him.
"Here." She pointed at the jerky, offered another smile.
The woman's eyes searched the room as if hunting for traps. The girl on her hip pointed at the jerky. "Mala!" she said, tugging on her mother's dress. "Mala, Mala!"
"It's a'fin, I swear." Lyseira patted the fallen pillar she'd been using as a makeshift bench, inviting her guests to sit. His face unreadable, Seth retreated from the doorway to watch from the corner.
Finally, the woman's hunger overcame her caution. She set down her daughter, who scrambled over to Lyseira with a reckless grin. "Angna, pellye!" the woman snapped. Lyseira's smile wasn't forced, this time. A mother's rebuke, she thought. The same in every language. "Angna!"
"It's all right!" Lyseira repeated. Angna snatched the jerky from her hand and tore into it, eyes bright. "Yes, that's yours!" She laughed and ruffled the girl's dark hair.
The woman gave a cautious smile as she drew closer—this one, too, more authentic than the one before. "I am sorry for Angna," she said. "She is not used to gifts."
Lyseira waved off the apology and handed her the other piece of jerky. "I can tell she's hungry. It's a'fin." She extended her hand. "I'm Lyseira, and that is my brother, Seth."
The woman took her hand. "Cosani." She had such a weak grip, Lyseira wondered if she was deliberately trying to be as unthreatening as possible. "You are very kind."
"Well." Lyseira shook her head at the compliment. "I just want to help. Do you want a piece to take home? For Chon?"
As Cosani began to refuse, Lyseira pulled out another strip and pressed it into her hands. "I insist." She smiled again. Body language was universal; it helped to set the other woman at ease. After a short hesitation Cosani returned the smile, nodding rapidly, and packed the food away.
"How is Chon?" Lyseira asked. "Is he well?"
"Yes. Completely healed." She reined in the questions in her eyes.
"It's all right. You can ask me."
Cosani gave her a long look, then shook her head.
"It's a'fin." Lyseira took a guess. "You know someone else who needs help?"
"No," Cosani said at once. "No, no, is not that. Just only―" She sighed, obviously uncomfortable. "Why would you do this?"
"Well, I didn't," Lyseira said after a heartbeat. "Akir did. I only work miracles because he grants them. He . . ."
But Cosani shook her head. "This is very humble words, but untrue. Hundreds in Tal'aden can work miracles. All claim Akir's blessing. But you . . . only you have ever helped for nothing. Only you say you must share them."
"Well . . ." That's just what I believe, she started to say, but wasn't that sophistry? There was more to it than that. "I . . . wasn't raised that way. The abbot I served would never turn the needy away. I grew up thinking that was just . . . how the Church worked." A rueful laugh. How wrong I was, she thought.
"It does not."
"No, it doesn't. I know that now. But . . ." She sighed, debating how much to say. "I tried for years to become initiated. I wanted nothing more, growing up, than to work a miracle and join the Church. But it wasn't until I turned my back on them—that I chose what was right rather than what I was told—that Akir blessed me. He saved my friend's life, after we—after an attack on the road."
Seth bristled in the corner, eyes bright with condemnation, but he remained silent.
"Later, I saved someone else, a stranger. He didn't even thank me—in fact, I think he hated me. But at the time, it was the right thing to do. It was Akir's will." She shook her head and looked at Cosani. "I don't always understand Him myself. But you wanted to know why I do it—that is why."
Cosani pursed her lips. "You shouldn't. No one stays in this place"—she gestured at the wall of wooden slats, the stagnant puddles of rainwater—"by choice. You could have so much more. You should go claim it."
"You mean join the Church?" A sad smile. "I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Hopefully, we won't be here long."
"What are you here for?"
"The Dedication."
Cosani looked surprised, then disappointed. "Of course. I should have known this. But still. Should not stay in Red. Charge if you must. Stay at inn in city." A grimness stole into her eyes. "You are good person. Good people in Red—they don't last long."
"What do you mean?" Lyseira asked. "Is that what happened to Chon?"
"Chon―" The word broke in her throat. She coughed it loose, fighting to keep her composure. "I am sorry. I was scared for him."
"I understand." Lyseira squeezed her hand. "It's all right."
But Cosani shook her head again. "It is not. Chon is good boy, but the gangs are already sniffing after him. Gial and his thugs, they . . . ah, Kirith a'jhul." She sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve. "He tried to earn some money honestly, you see? Many pilgrims in town, much money, so he run messages for them. Nearly two crowns he earned!" Her voice was fierce with pride. "His first thought is for his family. For me, his sei-sa, and my little Angna. Always I care for him and now he wanted to care for us. He wanted to surprise us. Food is always hard in Red, it is always hungry here, but sometimes the taverns have scraps. We can eat from their garbage or they will invite us in before closing doors at night to take bones or broth."
The words sucked the air from Lyseira's chest. You eat from the garbage? She looked at Angna, playing with the wooden slats. The girl smiled back at her. Lyseira could see the knobs at her wrists.
"But this curséd Dedication has changed everything—there is no scraps, and the tavern keepers will not let us near, night or day. They are too busy growing rich off the pilgrims. We will scare them away, they say. And two months it is before they dedicate this book, two months they will stay here!" She was shaking, anxious. "And so Chon, he takes his money and he leaves Red to buy food. You see? He does not steal it. We are starving, yet he does not steal. He earns and then he buys, but this merchant, this szar-khent"—she spat the word like a curse—"only sees an easy mark. A piece of sehk from Red. So he robs him. He robs Chon, and when my brother fights, he is stabbed."
Lyseira remembered how proud she had felt that morning when she'd healed Chon's wound—how virtuous. But the healed wound was nothing, she realized: a single arrow dodged under a rain of archer fire.
"How . . . what will you do?"
"Ach." Cosani waved Lyseira's concern away, as if suddenly regretting how much she'd said. "We will survive. There are ways for me to feed my family." She stood abruptly, her jaw tight, her eyes hard.
"Angna, pellshe," she snapped, patting her thigh. "Inya cosh e'lep." Then, to Lyseira: "We have stayed too long. Thank you once more."
"Of course, yes. Any time." They were things you said to a departing houseguest, not a woman who had just admitted she ate from the trash, but the other words were all too big. I'm sorry for what's happened to you. Everything you said was appalling. Your life is horrible.
I want so badly to help but have no idea how.
"Bye-bye!" Angna called, waving. "Dank oo!"
"You're welcome, sweetheart." Her heart breaking, Lyseira turned back to her bag. "Wait. Please, here—take the rest." She put the other nine pieces of jerky into Cosani's hand. The woman looked at the food, some internal argument warring in her eyes, and finally pushed it ba
ck.
"No," she said. "Don't you see, Lyseira? You need this.
"You live here now, too."
iv. Angbar
"'This is my best script,'" Mistress Zandra recited, and he copied it down word-for-word, as neatly as he could while keeping up with her tempo. "Period. 'Atypical and conspicuous language shan't vex me, nor shall First Tongue words such as a'fin.' Exclamation."
The scribing hall was a cramped space the size of The Abbot's old chapel in Southlight, but packed wall-to-wall with scribes at long tables on unforgiving benches. The smell reminded him a bit of a carpenter's shop: sweat, sawdust, and paper. Syntal labored next to him, her hair a curtain across her face. Angbar finished first and set down his quill as the scribe mistress had requested, fighting the urge to stretch his hand. No need to show weakness.
"You're slow," the scribe mistress said to Syntal, who ignored her and kept writing. When Zandra came to Angbar's work, she sniffed. "Very solid, for a nog. I'm pleasantly surprised."
Angbar started to give her a relieved smile, but the thud of the tome she dropped on the table interrupted him. "Copy page fifty-seven. Use the same parchment. It must be impeccable script, but you may take liberties with vertical margins."
"Yes, ma'am," he answered. It took him half an hour, but he managed to fit the entire script into the remaining space from his first page.
"Slow," Zandra said to him as they waited for Syntal to finish the same task. "I have scribes twice as fast as you."
"Well, I am new at it." Zandra's face, already pinched, betrayed a subtle outrage at his protest. "But I'll learn to get faster!"
"You should learn to hold your tongue, that's what you should learn," Zandra muttered.
Angbar had no idea why the woman was such a witch, but for the moment, he decided to take her advice. They waited, surrounded by the scratching of pens and the occasional quiet cough, for Syntal to finish. When the young woman finally set down her quill, Zandra barked a laugh.
"You're even slower than he is!" She snatched the paper from the table to appraise it. "Hm. It is impeccable quality, I'll give you that, but it took you nearly twice as long as his!" She fell quiet, reviewing Syn's work and thinking. "Fine. Normally I'd never even consider scribes as slow as you two, but with the pilgrims here, there's a huge demand for books. I'll hire you, seasonal only, through the Dedication and two weeks past. One shell per day."
"One shell?" Syntal massaged the wrist on her writing hand. "The sign said two!"
"The sign said two for competent scribes, which you are not. I'm getting a slow girl and a nog. Combined, you nearly make one competent scribe, so it's two shells a day for the pair." She gave Angbar a sidelong glance. "A nog," she muttered, as if he weren't sitting right in front of her. "Where did you learn to write, anyway?"
"I've been writing all my life," he said. "My parents taught me."
"Well, your work may have been sufficient for bookkeeping, but it will barely qualify here. Two shells for the pair." She looked at Syntal, clearly believing it was the pale girl's decision to make.
Angbar felt blood rushing to his face. 'Bookkeeping'? He'd faced his share of nog-hating before, but in Southlight, this kind of abject dismissal was rare. Most people were fair, and the unfair ones were usually shamed into line when the other villagers caught wind of them. Let's go, he wanted to say. We don't need to put up with this.
But for some reason he stood there, ears burning, as Syntal considered the offer.
"I have a counter-offer," she finally said, and Zandra's brows rose. "If you're concerned about poor production from us, why not tie the pay to the production rate? Instead of paying us by the day, pay us by the page. You say you have scribes who produce forty pages per day? That's twenty pages per shell, or call it . . ." She did some quick math. "Seven-tenths of a heel per page. You can pay us half a heel per page. That's less than you pay your fastest scribes, and you're already paying them far less per page than you do your slowest workers."
Half a heel? Angbar was no mathematical genius, but even he could tell Syntal had probably just cut their pay by half―a rate which had already been cut in half once. Syn, what are you doing?
Zandra peered at Syntal, suspecting some deception, but couldn't find a flaw in the math. "Fine. You can start tomorrow at sunup. My scribes work dawn to dusk. You can break for half an hour at highsun to eat. Dawndays off, of course."
"If we're being paid by the page," Syntal answered, "shouldn't our schedule be tied to our production? Instead of a minimum number of hours, why not a minimum number of pages? Say a quota of twenty each, per day?"
Zandra scoffed, out of patience. "You've got a lot of demands, girl. I'm not staying here past sunset because you two can't make a quota."
"You don't have to. If it's time to close shop and we haven't met our quota, we go home like everyone else—but we forfeit that day's pay."
Angbar's head whipped toward her so fast it nearly came off. "What?"
"But," Syntal went on, "subject to that limitation, we're free to arrive when we please and leave when we please, provided the quota is met."
Zandra fumed. Angbar could tell the offer tempted her, but she didn't like negotiating like this. She shook her head. "I need my scribes here at dawn. No exceptions."
"You need your twenty pages per day—forty, for the two of us—at a dirt-cheap rate. We're giving up a lot. You can give us this."
Zandra fell quiet, chewing it over, before slapping a fresh sheet of parchment on to the table in front of Syntal.
"M'sai," she said. "We'll do it your way. Draw it up, just as you quoted it to me, and I want signatures from both of you. I'm not going in front of a magister for this, and I'm not renegotiating once the ink is dry."
Syntal spread her hands, the picture of reasonability. "Of course not."
They finally left at sunset. Angbar's feet were killing him from a day spent on hard stone, and he was hungry enough to chew them off to stop the pain. A cauldron of irritation boiled in his chest. As soon as the shop was out of sight, it erupted.
"What was that?" The accusation came out fiercer than he'd meant it, but between the hunger headache and the fact that he'd just sold himself into nearly three months of indentured servitude, he didn't much care. "We walked out with a quarter of what we were expecting! A per-page rate? Twenty pages minimum? No pay if we miss it?"
"Lower your voice," Syn said. "People are looking."
He wrestled his tone under control. "Syn, I'm . . . that wasn't good."
"It was the only way to get a flexible schedule out of her. We need that in order to make a plan concerning the Hall."
"M'sai, but—working for free?"
"We're not gonna work for free. We'll be making about four shells a day. Five, if we need them."
Angbar jerked to a stop. "Five?" That was nearly a crown every other day. "Syn, her fastest scribes are doing forty pages. To make five shells we'd have to copy . . ." The math spiraled out of control, lost in the noise of his pounding headache. "Over a hundred, at least―"
"One-forty." She took his hand. "Come on. Keep walking. We're really late." After she'd gotten him moving again, she whispered, "I've been working on something for you. A gift. I took some of the extra paper Lyseira brought and started a copy of the first wardbook."
Was this supposed to assuage him? "M'sai . . ."
"But it was really slow going, so I got a little distracted. I started working on something else instead, something to make it go faster." That bounce was in her step again, that urgent clip to her tone. "There's a chant in the first book, just really simple, that lets you draw with your finger. You remember that one? I did it back at the Keg and Kettle in Keldale."
"I remember." Iggy had nearly lost his mind. He'd shoved Syn off the bed, raving about how she should never do it again. It might have gotten ugly if they hadn't been interrupted. "Iggy―"
"Well, I looked at that chant a little closer. Really looked at it. And I tried different pieces of it, whil
e Ascended. And I found―"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa—you said that was dangerous." Never Ascend without a chant, she'd told him when he was still learning. The chant is like a signpost—without it, you may not find your back.
"I said it was dangerous for you."
"M'sai, but . . ." The argument died, another victim of his throbbing head. Syntal dove through the gap.
"Look, it doesn't matter. What matters is, I found the part of the chant that defines the writing! It doesn't actually make your finger draw light. It uses the movement of your finger as a kind of guide, but the writing itself comes from a different part of the chant."
"M'sai . . ." He wasn't following.
"So I isolated that part of the chant that follows your finger, that tells it where to make the light. But I thought, instead of light, what if it made ink? There's a component of Marlin's eye-disguise chant which doesn't directly do what I needed, but it gave me an idea to―"
"Syn. I can't follow this right now. What are you getting at?"
She broke into a tight, fierce grin. "I wrote my own chant, Angbar! I used bits and pieces of others I've seen before, but I figured out the rest of it myself! And it really works!"
"You . . ." What?
How did you do that? When did you do that? Don't you know you could have killed yourself? Did you stop to think? "What . . . what does it do?"
She couldn’t help herself; the answer came out in a gleeful squeal. "It copies script!"
Comprehension dawned, again bringing him to a standstill.
"Blesséd sehk."
"Yes! It works by following your quill while you're writing. You just write on top of a stack of papers, and everything you do gets echoed onto every sheet on the stack—or at least, as many as you can stand. The more you do, the more . . . you know, the harder it gets on you, and it'll be extra tough because we'll need to use the chant to hide our eyes first, every time." Her smile faded. "The only thing is, it didn't actually help me to copy your book any faster, so . . . that's not actually done yet."
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